Like some unlucky, desperate and even comical man, art always seems to be getting itself into some sort of crisis or other, only in order to show us how it has found its way out again. It is not our crisis. We might be revolted by the idea that as spectators and readers - as consumers of culture - we are less participants than impotent bystanders. We can do nothing but watch, or become innocent victims while the important decisions are taking place elsewhere. This, by and large, is how life feels now.

Questions of culture might feel academic, but they are not. The affair of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the furore over Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform, the murders and mayhem engendered by a foolish remark in a Nigerian newspaper about the Miss World contest, all show us that cultures (high and low, religious and secular) count. We might take it that this situation is a reflection of the fact that we are living through a moment of particular, unprecedented desperation: a situation ripe with portents and symbols, whose signs are everywhere, as we lurch once more into war. If very little art of note strikes one as a direct reflection or consideration of the immediate situation, it is not just that artists or writers, like the rest of us, feel themselves to be impotent (though that is precisely the theme of Houellebecq's novels), so much as that what any one individual might say or do cannot be taken as speaking for anyone else.

There are many who believe that art is in danger of being subsumed by what is called the "culture industry", which is increasingly regarded as synonymous with the entertainment industry (in itself, a chilling phrase). That, in Britain at least, contemporary art has never had a larger audience can be read as a cause for concern, and signal to art's "relevance" (another word I dislike). I am a little wary of the current situation, as well as confused by it. Some contemporary artists - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, for example - are household names, and Emin, Mad Tracey from Margate, has achieved the dubious status of "cultural icon". Soon enough she'll be a "national treasure", although an awkward one. This kind of attention - in the tabloid as well as the broadsheet press, in style magazines, gossip columns and comedy shows - does not mean that these artists' works are well understood, or examined in much depth, but maybe this is not quite the point.

Every year, the British media gets caught up in muddled arguments about the shortlist for the Turner Prize. One or other of the contenders is vilified and lampooned in the press for their seemingly opaque or ridiculous contributions to the exhibition: Tracey Emin's unmade bed, Martin Creed's Lights Going On and Off and, in 2002, Fiona Banner's billboard-sized text Arsewoman in Wonderland. What the artists might have intended by these works, the part the works come to play in the national cultural psyche, and what passes for a cultural debate, are of course different things.

That art provokes fierce and opinionated debate, however stereotypical that debate might be, can even be taken as a signal to the importance people attach to art and culture. That newspaper leader columns and news broadcasts weigh in with their opinions, and members of parliament make public pronouncements on the matter, is even regarded as a sign that at least some contemporary art is engaging with the public. And that, of course, is seen as a good thing.

At the same time, there are perennial, predictable calls for a return to traditional values - to figurative painting and sculpture, to the handmade, to demonstrable craft skills. But were the Turner Prize (and other prizes like it in Europe and America) to bow to these criticisms, and to select a shortlist representative of these values (mistaken though they may be), it is unlikely that public interest would be sustained. People like controversy, and even perceive sensationalism where none exists. They also like having their prejudices reconfirmed once in a while. They like, to use the most frequent and depressing buzzword, to be "challenged". To be "challenged", according to gallery press releases and pronouncements by curators and pundits, is healthy. It is like an evil-tasting medicine: the more unpalatable, the more good it will do you. And similarly, the more astringent and severe the art, the more virtuous it is. There is a streak of puritanism in all this. Whether or not art, or movies, or novels, should be doing you any good in the first place is a debatable point.

The crisis, if there is one, is as much an invention of the popular press as it is of critics and theorists, or of artists themselves. That artists find themselves brooding over such matters on an everyday basis is unlikely: it is impossible to live in a constant state of emergency. Artists, like writers of fiction, poetry or plays, more frequently proceed from a position of relative blindness towards a goal which, to begin with, is largely unknown. Nor do they know, necessarily, what their work will come to mean when it finally makes its appearance in the world, where it will either be discussed, analysed, paraphrased by its audience or, just as likely, ignored. At best, a work might escape its specialist audience, at which point it will begin to live another kind of life, quite beyond its maker's control.

It is sometimes said that the most radical position an artist can take now is precisely a return to the kinds of skills much contemporary art seems to have forgotten or left behind. Yet there are examples everywhere of just such "traditional" practices being carried out, to greater and lesser effect. Many artists now seem to have given up on "things" in favour of installations, temporary mises-en-scène, filmed and videoed reportage, which look more like documentary work. They gave up on "truth to materials" and crafted unique objects a long time ago.

For many younger artists, the unique handmade object has been rejected almost as soon as it has been contemplated; it is not even considered as an option any more, except to be treated with extreme irony and disdain. The real, for them, is somewhere else. We had better get used to it. But, at the same time, artists as different in outlook as the German sculptor Thomas Schütte or Jake and Dinos Chapman, have made a kind of return to precisely those techniques which others around them have discarded. They model, they carve, they etch, but do so not in order to revivify endangered values or methods or to answer some almost Pre-Raphaelite call to duty, but because the particu lar tone of voice they are able to adopt gives them an opportunity to occupy a particular mental, conceptual and physical territory.

For the audience, the pressing and immediate problem is one of discernment, of how to be able to tell what work is of value and how much of it is a token gesture. For some artists - perhaps the majority - having a career in the art world is enough, although it is a paltry thing and the work is frequently secondary. I am showing at Arco. I am doing Venice next year. I am a contender for the Turner Prize. I am making photographs, because I need something to sell, because there is no money in the videos and DVD installations I make. Just as bad are the painters who think there is something more authentic and soul-searching in what they do. As if their engagement with this medium signals, by the simple fact that they are doing it, a greater engagement with profound and lasting values. This horribly annoying and presumptuous stance is no different from another's use of new technologies in the hope that, in itself, this signifies greater modernity, or that what they are doing is necessarily more relevant because of the medium they employ. Not so long ago, the hologram was regarded as the way forward, the medium of the future. There was even a Museum of Holography set up in New York. The hologram has found its rightful place, finally, as a security device on credit cards and bank notes.

The photograph did not kill painting or, if it did, painters carried on regardless. One might even argue that painting has influenced photography much more than vice versa. The relationship between cinema and artists' work with the projected image (video and film installations, for example) is a historically more complex affair than simply a matter of a mass public entertainment medium being appropriated by artist-auteurs in order to "deconstruct" cinematic narrative and cinematic space and time or to illustrate a notional "crisis of representation".

Although much talked about in art and academic circles in the past decade or so, this last crisis has not put an end to the production and consumption of images at all, but has instead served only to create more images. More critical images, some might say, but images none the less.The word crisis sounds as though something dramatic and sudden and frightful were about to happen. Which perhaps it is. But the idea of the end is almost perpetual, and has been with us probably for all human life.

There is nothing new about a sense of the End. And as Frank Kermode pointed out, getting on for 40 years ago, in a book called The Sense of an Ending , "Perhaps, if we have a terrible privilege it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time. Other people have noticed this, and expressed their feelings about it in images different from ours, armies in the sky, for example, or a palpable Antichrist... But it would be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis feelings than armies in the sky."

For the artist or the fiction writer, crisis might manifest itself in the most quotidian way, in the dreaded creative block, rather than in "issues" of whether or not theory has closed the door forever on any future progress, that everything possible has already been done, or even that the end of the world is nigh. Those who make installations, or video or film art, might begin with the idea that their chosen territory is wide open, that everything is possible, but soon discover that it has its internal and contingent problems, its own belated history, its own limits, and that the practitioners of any medium might find themselves at the end of the road, at any time. The end is one thing, being deserted by one's own creative impulse another. But these days, of course, it is quite possible to continue to function even as a successful artist without ever having a creative impulse in the first place. You can have a career instead.

To use a form of words favoured by the psychoanalytically inclined, the end has "always already" been reached, has "always already happened". We must begin with cultural exhaustion, and then find a voice and follow where that voice leads. Painting, as the critic Yves-Alain Bois has described, reached this point a long time ago, and he has written of painting now as an endless "task of mourning". It makes you want to shout "Get Over It" through a crack in the studio door. But on reflection, it turns out that mourning might not be such a bad thing. For the painter, the idea of the end, and of being up against it, might lead to a strong fantasy about what is possible. And strong fantasies - such as the enduring myth of crisis or of the End itself - might be necessary to make work possible. It is, at least, something to believe in.

Ideas of crisis can be a prop, a way out of trouble. Who would not like to be the last writer, to have, as it were, the last word? Who would not want to paint the last painting, or make the last movie, or write the final symphony in the music of the end of time? Such mythic finalities are attractive, but dangerous. Crisis, however, is frequently a refuge for those looking for a substitute for religious fervour, the eschatological bulwark. So here we are, in crisis, and there's an end to it, except that the end never quite arrives. Like Godot in Beckett's play, the end is always promised, but never arrives. Godot's refusal to show up is his nature. His not showing up is what, precisely, he always does. His not showing up is so reliable as to be almost a law of nature. His promise to keep his appointment (a promise made offstage, intimated rather than heard) is one made with the absolute certainty that he will fail to honour it. If we really wanted him to show up, we'd stop making these damn fool arrangements. What we really want, of course, is what he always gives us: that is to say, our (or rather Vladimir and Estragon's) disappointment. After all the dated funny business, this, to me, is what lasts in Beckett's play. And its absurdity has never felt more prescient.

Disappointment seems a weak word in relation to crisis - though deep and profound disappointment is a far from weak emotion. Disappointment is in part a call to the mythical past. We might also find that much current art is also a work of disappointment (as well as being, all too frequently, disappointingly trivial). Those who long, nostalgically, for an art more closely wedded to canonical values of the past, try to pick and chose selectively, and are more certain in their fantasies than they are in history.

They dislike the fact that their disillusionment is mirrored by the culture they inhabit, and that things have turned out quite the way they have. They would prefer the world to be otherwise. It isn't. The crisis goes on.

· A longer Spanish version of this article appears in Revista de Occidente no.261, published in February 2003.